As a poet, my concern is to create beauty for a general audience. Recent times have made me flexible and experimental with form and ‘telling it slant’, but I embrace traditional forms like the ghazal or haiku as lovingly as I do more contemporary ways of writing poems. And while I honour such poetic concerns as tweaking, experimenting with, exploding, or exploring language, right now I am writing to communicate with a reader, to transmit and commune with the reader around a ‘point’.

My themes are general or universal, and can be entertaining or traditional fodder for poetry, yes, but not necessarily so, they can be intense and esoteric and new. No theme might be more universal than ‘I love you’ and ‘Fire! Save yourselves!’

Climate change, for instance, whether or not we like to face facts, is affecting all of us. We are in a home that is heating up and shaking and there is nowhere else to go — for man-children obsessed with spaceflight cannot ferry us billions to Mars. Besides, how inhospitable the red planet is, how hostile to life as we know it. I choose to make poetry with the theme of climate change at present, because I want to make beauty even out of this grimness, as a way of coping with the situation.